When MagdalÉna drew the dagger out of her hair that night, she laughed a little and tossed it into her handkerchief box. She had seen men carried off their feet for the first time, not caring whether the world laughed or not. She had also noted the exact order of homage that she was to expect from men. Helena infatuated. The other girls inspired admiration in varying measure. Respect for her father's millions was her portion. She had watched and compared all the evening. It would have distressed and appalled her had she made her dÉbut last winter. As it was, it mattered little.

Occasionally there is a lively winter in San Francisco. This promised to be almost brilliant. There were six balls in the next two weeks. At each Helena's triumphs were reiterated. The men waited in a solid body between the front door and the staircase, and she had promised, divided, and subdivided every dance before she had set foot on the lowest step. It was almost impossible to begin a party until her arrival. Kettledrums had been inaugurated the previous winter, and hardly a man been got to them. Now the men would have begged for invitations. They even began to attend church; and Helena's "evening" was so crowded that she was obliged to ask five or six of her girl friends to help her. Alan Rush, Eugene Fort, Carter Howard, a Southerner of charming manners, infinite tact, and little conversation, and "Dolly" Webster, a fledgeling of enormous length and well-proportioned brain, were her shadows, her serfs, her determined, trembling adorers. They barely hated one another, so devoured were they by the sovereign passion; and as they were treated with exasperating similitude, there was nothing to set them at one another's throats.

Helena had all the gifts and arts of the supreme coquette. She allured and mocked, appealed and commanded; adapted herself with the suppleness of bronze to mould, with enchanting flashes of egotism; discarded all perception of man's existence in the abstract, when she had surrendered her attention to one, to jerk him out of his heaven by ordering him to go and send her his rival; possessed a quickness of intuition which finished a man's sentences with her eyes, an exquisite sympathy which made a man feel that here at last he was understood (as he would wish himself understood, rather than as he understood himself); an audacity which never failed to surprise, and never shocked; a fund of talk which never wore itself into platitudes, and a willing ear; and an absolute confidence in herself and her destiny. In addition she had great beauty, the high light spirits of her mercurial temperament, a charming and equable manner (when not engaged in judiciously tormenting her slaves), and a shrewd brain. What wonder that her sovereignty was something for the men who worshipped her to remember when they too were old beaux, and that their present condition was abject? The wonder was that the women did not hate her; but so impulsive and unaffected a creature disarms her own sex, particularly when her gowns are faultless, and she is not lifeless in their company, to scintillate the moment a man enters the room.

And they forbore to criticise the dictates of her royal fancy. It is true that she deferred to no one's opinion, but she escaped criticism nevertheless. If she capriciously refused to dance at a party, but sat the night through with one man, not recognising the existence of her lowering train, people merely smiled and shrugged their shoulders, saving their scowls for those who were not the fashion. Sometimes these flirtations took place in the open ball-room, sometimes in the conservatory; it was all one to Helena, whose powers of concentration amounted to genius. At one of the Presidio hops she spent the evening—it was moonlight—in a boat on the bay with an officer who was as accomplished a flirt as herself. The appearance of Rush, Fort, Howard, and Webster upon this occasion was pitiable. On her evening, if she tired of her admirers before they could reasonably be expected to leave, she walked out of the room without excuse and went to bed. She not only ran to fires when the humour seized her, but she commanded her quartette to rush every time the alarm sounded, that they might be at her beck in the event of officious policemen. As fires are frequent in San Francisco, these enamoured young men were profoundly thankful when they occurred at such times as they happened to be in their tyrant's presence: they were willing to bundle into their clothes at two in the morning, or to leave their duties at midday, were they sure of meeting her; but as she was as capricious about fires as about everything else, their chances were as one in ten. They hinted once that she might advise them of her pleasure by telephone, but were peremptorily snubbed. Helena never made concessions.

It was at the end of the second month that her father imported a coach from New York. She had driven since her baby days, and could handle four horses as scientifically as one. Thereafter, one of the sights of Golden Gate Park on fine afternoons was Helena on the box of the huge black and yellow structure, tooling a party of her delighted friends, her father beside her, one of her admirers crouched at her indifferent shoulder. It was the only gentleman's coach in California, for in the Eighties the youth of the city had not turned their wits and prowess to sport. Few of them could drive with either grace or assurance, and Helena's accomplishment was the more renowned. Occasionally Colonel Belmont was allowed to drive, a favour which he enjoyed with all the keenness of his dashing youth.

"I told you how it would be," said Ila to Rose. "She is not only belle, but leader. That's the real reason Caro's gone to New York. We are nowhere. I'd turn eccentric, regularly shock people, if I had the good luck to be the fashion. But I've got to marry well. When I have—you'll see."

"We can't all be raving belles," said Rose. "If Helena were so much as doubled, the men would be gibbering idiots. I don't care, so long as I have a good time; and I hold my own. So do you. As for Tiny, she may not be mobbed, but she has one man in love with her after another. As soon as poor Charley Rollins got his congÉ, Bob Payne took the vacant seat, and I see a third climbing over the horizon with business in his eye. There can be only one sun, but we're all stars of the first magnitude."

"But we'd each like to be the sun, all the same."